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Re:The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019) by munificent on Friday December 11, 2020 @04:46PM (#25391557)
I played hours and hours of Maelstrom back in the day. The game ran so smoothly. It just a beautiful, seamless play experience.

Any details on what the code was like for these games? I'd love a peek behind the curtain. At the time, it felt incredibly well-polished.

Re:The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019) by TomAnthony on Friday December 11, 2020 @05:02PM (#25391846)
I also played many many hours of Maelstrom! That particular game is now open source [1].

On the whole, the main code of most games was not written by Ambrosia. There was a form on the website where you could submit a simple demo of a game idea you had. If Ambrosia thought it had potential then we would sign you up, to support the development, publishing and distribution.

Ambrosia had a series of libraries, which were a mixture of C and Assembler, for graphics and sound etc. We had an in house graphic artist. And, of course, the shareware licensing code and mechanism.

It was a great model. Coders with an idea could get support to take their game to the next level, and sell it etc. It all seems so easy now but the net was in its infancy then. We were mailing out CDs filled with the games.

I never got my hands dirty of the game code, but I know the libraries we had were well polished and optimised, and so were very valuable to coders (no stack overflow back then!).

[1] https://github.com/richardjs/Maelstrom

Re:The Rise and Fall of Ambrosia Software (2019) by amatecha on Friday December 11, 2020 @05:00PM (#25391804)
Funny you should ask, someone else linked the github repo of Maelstrom 3.0 SDL port! https://github.com/richardjs/maelstrom

So, I'm not sure how much of the code is near-original Macintosh version code, and how much was revised/replaced to support SDL. Probably lots of original stuff though, surely.